The problem with that was that I didn’t have any loved ones. Dead or otherwise.
(Did dead friends and intimate acquaintances count? And if so, what would we have to say to each other, in these circumstances?)
Oh, it was possible I had loved my parents in childhood, though I doubted it strongly. I was sure that from the time I had the intellectual capacity to understand what the word ‘love’ meant, I no longer felt that for them if I ever had. As far as I knew I had always been selfish; my parents’ welfare and happiness had meant nothing to me except insofar as, and precisely to the extent that, they affected my own. I’d had no siblings to practice loving on. My mother’s love for me had generally struck me as a cloying annoyance whose sole virtue was that it could sometimes be exploited to advantage. As for my father, once my storms of adolescence were past I had come gradually to respect and admire him—but I had never loved him. Whether he had loved me or not, I honestly did not know.
I had to admit, though, that he was the most likely candidate to greet me if anyone would. Of all those I cared about who had died before me, he was the one who (I thought) most visited my dreams and most evaded my waking thoughts. I wondered if dead admirals wore their uniforms. Would he steam up to me in a floating aircraft carrier—or, more likely, his first command, the USS Smartt? Or would he manifest as I best remembered him, sitting bolt upright at his desk, chainsmoking Pall Malls and coughing like a snowmobile and doing incomprehensible things with paper that changed the lives of people halfway around the globe?
Let’s get this show on the road, I thought, and as though in response, my universe began to change.
I’m not sure how to describe it. I’m certain I won’t convey it. It was as though my senses of light, hearing, taste, smell and touch all coalesced into a single sense, with the special virtues of each and the limits of none. It seemed to me then that there had really only been one sense all along—the sense of touch—and that all the other senses had only been other ways of touching. This too was a new way of touching, as wide-ranging as sight and as intimate as taste. Nothing could block this vision, nor distort this hearing. It was similar to the LSD experience in several ways, not least of which is that I cannot describe it to you and you will not know what I mean until you have been there. As with acid, most of the metaphors that spring to mind are visual. The scales have fallen from my eyes. I once was blind and now I see. I can see clearly now. Oh, there’s the forest—
With this new sense, I probed ahead of me, as one reaches out an exploratory hand in a dark cave. And found that I was come nigh the end of the tunnel. The “green light” was “blinding,” but between it and me I dimly made out a number of…somethings, hovering on the edge of tangibility. One of them came to me, and without body or limbs or features somehow became an entity, a self, a person. Recognition was a massive jolt, even in that detached frame of mind. I should have expected to meet her. I had not. I was wrong about my father being the one who most visited my dreams. He was only the one who most visited the dreams I remembered on waking.
“Hello, Pooh Bear.”
“Barbara!”
I tried frantically to back-pedal somehow, to flap my arms and escape, kick my legs and swim away back upstream like a salmon. I no longer had even phantom arms and legs, and the force that drew me was as inexorable as gravity.
We were touching.
So there was retribution in the afterlife after all…
The others could “hear” us, but for a time they left us alone. I knew them not. Music was playing somewhere, and I paid no attention.
There was no hurry here. I tasted her, and all the memories flooded back with aching clarity, their emotional colorations faded almost to invisibility but none the less powerful for that. A black and white two dimensional photograph of Rodin’s The Lovers can yet stir heart and loins.
She was no longer the Barbara I had known, of course, except in the sense that the flower is still the seed, but her aspect was familiar. I understood that she had put on that aspect to welcome me, as one might nostalgically put on an old garment to greet an old love—and that she had had to rummage a while in a musty trunk to find it.
To convey what happened then I must pretend that we used words.
“Hello, Barbara.”
“Hello, Sam.”
“I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I’m sorry that I didn’t love you.”
Her response will not really go into words. She was like one who tries not to laugh at a child, but cannot help smiling, because his fear is imaginary. None the less real for that, nor less painful—but imaginary and thus comical too. “But you did.”
I could make no response. Many times I had fantasized this conversation, in the days before the wound had finally scabbed over…but this statement I had never imagined Barbara making. Could a ghost be mistaken?
“Truly you did.”
“I never.”
“You taught me to stand up straight. To be strong. To accept no authority above my own reason. You stood up for me, even when it cost.”
“I cheated on you. And let you find out.”
“You knew we were not meant to be permanent life-partners. I didn’t. You knew how badly you would hurt me if I stayed with you, and tried to deal me the lesser hurt—at greater cost to yourself.”
“Bullshit. I wanted to get laid and I just didn’t care if it hurt you.”
“Then why let me find out?”
I made no reply. Pressure of some kind built. Finally:
“Barbara, you know I did not love you. Or were you too busy there at the end?”
“What do you mean, Sam?”
“Barbara…I killed you. And our child.”
“You did not.”
It boiled out of me so fast she recoiled, it spewed out like projectile vomit or a burst boil or a slashed artery: “I let you both die! I saw the truck coming, and there was time for me to run and slam into you and knock you out of its path, just like in the movies, plenty of time. And I didn’t. It’s what a man would have done. What even a worm would have done…for a woman he loved. There was time. I was not willing to die in your place. I stood there and watched the truck crush you. Your belly burst and our baby came out. He lay there in your giblets and kicked a little and died while I watched and tried to think what to do. Just as you had a moment before. I already thought I was a monster, I guessed when my grandparents died and I didn’t give a damn, and I felt it again and stronger when Frank died and the first thought in my head was ‘Thank God it was him and not me,’ but that day as I watched you both die I knew for certain that I was not capable of love, and that I must never again pretend to myself or anyone else that I was!”
She waited until I had regained control. Then:
“First things first. Only one person died in that accident.”
“I saw him, I tell you—”
“You saw ‘it.’ You know better, Sam. You’ve always understood the anthropomorphic fallacy. I was four months gone. What came out of my belly looked like a little tiny person…and was not, any more than a four-celled blastula is a person, or an ovum, or a fingernail clipping. It did not have any neural cells. No brain, no spinal column, nothing that could be called a central nervous system. Not an axon or a dendrite or a ganglion. Nothing that could support sensation, self, let alone self-awareness. It could have become a person in time, if chance had so ruled—but it did not, or it would be here now.”
I knew somehow that she was correct, and a part of my pain began slowly to recede. I clutched after it. “It was alive, and it was going to be our baby, and I let it die. I let you die.”
“You had a split second in which to make a complex decision. You have just tasted your life as a single piece, grokked its fullness. Don’t you see that if you and I had let pregnancy force a bad decision on us and talked ourselves into staying together, our marriage and our life would have been a misshapen, stunted thing, crippling both of us, and the c
hild caught between us?”
“What has that got to do with it? It was my duty to save you. The crunch came and my true colours showed. I’d told myself I loved you, I had myself half convinced. But when the nitty gritty comes, when the chips are down, you can’t lie anymore. Bullshit walks. And I stood still, and watched you die.”
She did something that was even more like touching than what we had been doing, that was a caress and a hug and an embrace and a massage and a kiss, a thing that was infinitely soothing and comforting. Lacking a bloodstream to keep reinforcing it, my pain began to lessen, like a fist relaxing. I was baffled by her forgiveness.
“Sam,” she said when I had relaxed enough, “I’d like you to think about two things. First, think about how much you’ve suffered, over all the years between, for what you think you did to someone you did not love.
“Second, replay that accident just one more time. I heard the air horn the same moment you did. I had precisely as long to jump out of the way as you had to knock me out of the way. And better motivation. And I didn’t move a muscle either.”
And then she was gone and the next greeter came forward.
“Hello, Dad.”
“Hello, son. It’s good to see you.”
“Guess you didn’t hallucinate that voice after all, did you?”
“No.”
“What’s the procedure now?”
“The usual procedure is being modified.”
“Really? How?”
“Barbara greeted you first because we all agreed that it was necessary for you to make your peace with her before anything else. You and I have our fish to fry, too, but it is not necessary that we do it now.
“There are things we will talk about, things unsaid between us, things I never gave you and things you never forgave me. There will be a time when I will make my apology to you, for letting my selfish motivations call you up out of nothingness to be born and suffer and die, and demanding that you be grateful. That time is not now. There are others here who would talk to you, and what they have to say is not urgent either. There is no time here, and so there is no hurry.
“Nonetheless, we are—all of us—under enormous time pressure.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Son, you are a clever, self-serving son of a bitch. You managed to maneuver yourself into a position where you could die honourably and painlessly, commit suicide without getting busted for it. You had been wanting to for a long time, ever since Barbara died. It is not going to work.”
“Huh?”
“You are going to have to go back.”
“What?”
“But first you need a history lesson. You have to understand What Has Gone Before…and What Will Have Gone After.”
What I got from him then was just what he said it would be. A lesson, a long monologue, which I did not interrupt even once, so I am going to abandon the quotation marks and dialogue format. (I know you’re not supposed to drop a long lecture in near the end of your story. It’s like that dark and stormy night business; this is the way it happened and there’s nothing I can do about it.)
Mankind (my father told me) studied the brain for centuries, seeking the key to the mind/body problem. It began to achieve glimmerings of real understanding in the Nineteen-Forties and Fifties, as sophisticated brain surgery became technologically possible and ethically permissible. Newer and better approaches were found; newer and better tools made; newer and better models were built and studied and correlated: the brain is like a switchboard, the brain is like a computer, the brain is like a hologram, the brain is an incredibly complex ongoing chemical reaction, the brain is a reptile brain draped with a mammal brain with humanity a mere cherry on top. By the Sixties, it was obvious that many of the brain’s deepest secrets were close to being solved. By the mid-Seventies, a few years after Snaker killed me, a respected scientist was willing to predict before the American Association for the Advancement of Science that the “information storage code” of the human brain could be cracked within a decade or two, that neuropsychology was on the verge of grasping how the brain wrote and stored memories, that science stood at the doorstep of Self.
In the audience, a lonely widower named Jacques LeBlanc frowned. He was one of the half dozen neuroanatomists on Earth, and easily the best. He completely agreed with the prediction, and it terrified him. Alone in the room, he grasped the awful power implicit in understanding the brain, and he knew how power tends to be used. He had been alive when the atom bombs went off; a protégé of Dr. Albert Hoffman, he had seen LSD used by the CIA for mind-control experiments.
He saw that if you understood how memories were written and stored, why, then you could make direct copies of a memory, rich and vivid and multilayered copies, and give them to others, and that would be a wonderful thing. If the trick could eventually be extended to short-term memory, you would have something approaching telepathy, and if you could actually extend it to consciousness itself—
He saw just as clearly that those refinements might never come to pass.
All information is a code, and entropy says that it will always be easier to destroy information than to encode it in the first place. A library that took thousands of years to produce can be destroyed in an hour. A lifetime’s memories can be ended by a stroke in an instant. A tape-recorder’s “erase” head is a much simpler and cheaper device than its “record” and “playback” heads. First they invent a weapon; then they look for ways to use it as a tool.
So the first result of understanding memory would be mindwipe. LeBlanc knew that if that power were loosed on the world unchecked, then what may as well be called The Forces of Evil might win for centuries to come. Tyranny never had a greater ally than the ability to make your slave forget he opposes you. The other side of the coin—the aspect of memory that permits it to be shared—would be studied haltingly if at all, implemented slowly if ever. A preacher named Gaskin once said, “Between ego and entropy, there is no need for a Devil.”
LeBlanc looked around him at his world, seeking some institution or individual who could be trusted with such power. He saw no one whom he trusted more than himself. He was one of those rare people who are not capable of evading responsibility once perceived. With trepidation, with great humility, he set about conquering the world.
He used his superior knowledge and prominence in his field to misdirect and confound all others, using disinformation, falsifying data, throwing out red herrings and sending trustful friends and colleagues down blind alleys. Meanwhile, he raced ahead alone down the true paths, learning in secret and keeping his knowledge to himself.
By 1989 he had a crude, cumbersome form of mindwipe. The conquest of the world began to pick up speed.
In the next decade surgery—including brain surgery—suddenly got drastically simpler, and computer power got drastically cheaper. By 1995 LeBlanc had married his second wife Madeleine, and thanks to insights she provided he made the breakthrough that brought him true mindwipe. He could now walk up to any person and, without surgery or drugs, using only an induction gun and a microcomputer the size of a wallet, turn off their mind and take from it what he wished. He could open the vault of long-term memory storage, rifle any memory more than a few hours old, Xerox it or erase it forever as suited him. He strongly preferred to kill his enemies, given a choice, but did not allow his scruples to keep him from raping minds by the dozens when he deemed it necessary. He did his level best to minimize the necessity.
From that point on, he effectively owned Terra. He moved through human society at will, yet apart from it, unseen, or at least unremembered, by all save those he chose. He had access to anything under the control of any human being. He built his conspiracy slowly, carefully, putting full trust in no one except Madeleine. She had come underground with him—and that was nearly his undoing, for when she vanished, her brother Norman Kent thought that LeBlanc had killed her. It became necessary for LeBlanc to do mindsurgery on Norman, creating a new, amnesiac pe
rsonality named Joe. Four years later, Joe and a friend named Karyn Shaw put enough of the pieces together to come after LeBlanc a second time.
LeBlanc told them everything. He showed Joe and Karyn his own secret inner heart and asked them to judge him. They joined his conspiracy, and that very night killed a policeman to protect it.*
Two years later, twelve years after he had achieved the first clumsy form of mindwipe, in the ironically apt year of A.D. 2001, Jacques LeBlanc, neuroanatomist and amateur tyrant, and Joe No Last Name, gifted programmer and professional burglar, together developed mindwrite, co-wrote the computer language called Mindtalk, and perfected the brain-computer interface. They had true telepathy.
They no longer lived alone in the dark in meat-wrapped bone boxes. They no longer needed meat or bone to exist, could survive if need be the destruction of the brains from which they had sprung, could grow if need be new brains with bone and meat to haul them around, could if they chose replicate themselves perfectly and indefinitely. Barring catastrophe, they could live forever; no enemy could threaten them. At long last, human beings had taken a significant step toward immortality. Four of them finally held that previously abstract and hypothetical commodity, absolute power—more of it than had ever existed to be grasped before now.
They spent another eleven years manufacturing terminals—golden headbands—in large numbers, and warehousing them all over the planet without drawing attention, and assembling an army that did not know it existed. And the moment that task was completed, with a sigh of relief that came to be audible all over the globe, the secret masters of the world abdicated.
For this was their secret, self-evident strength: those whose power is genuinely absolute are incorruptible.
There came a morning in 2012 when every news medium on the planet that had any connection to the world computer network (virtually all media), print, audio, video, electronic, all opened with the same lead, though not a reporter alive could remember having written it and no editor had approved it for publication.
THOU ART GOD, said the headlines and broadcasters and datafeeds, in a hundred languages and dialects, to people who built spaceships and to people who herded goats, to saints and sinners, generals and monks, geniuses and fools, pros and cons, graybeards and children.
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